The Cornetto Trilogy and Co-Pilot

There were 1624 road deaths in 2023. That's a 5% decrease on 2022. But as driving instructors, I believe we can do more to reduce those numbers even further. That's why I've created this podcast, driving instructors to Vision Zero. But on the first of every month, I'll be giving you information and ideas for your driving school so you can create even safer drivers. Thank you for joining me on this fourth episode.

And later on in the show, we'll be joined by Ollie Taylor, who I record with at the recent driving instructor expo. So if you're wondering what all the background noise is, it's 1300 instructors having a great day. But first up, I chat with James Evans, who's here to talk about his new project co pilot. And before we get into that, James gives me one of the best answers I've heard as to the role of driving instructors within road safety.

Now, you may know James from first car, the honest truth, the young driver focus, that kind of stuff. And it really is making a difference within road safety. And I'm really excited about copilot. You can find all the links for that stuff in the show. Notes now, driving instructors to Vision Zero is part of the Instructor podcast network, and to find out more, head over to theinstructorpodcast.com, where you can find a bunch of road safety resources, a whole heap of content for ADIs and PDIs.

But for now, if you've clicked follow on your podcast player of choice, enjoy the show.

So, James, I'm keen to ask you to start off with what you think the role is of driving instructors within the road safety sector. Well, I mean, driving instructors, I mean, what can you say? They are responsible for training the next generation of drivers, and that's just the ones that are involved in young driver tuition, not the ones that do fleet training and other kind of reoffender, re offender rehabilitation. You've got the best part of three quarters of a million.

I don't know if it's 800,000 new drivers passing each year. And I imagine that almost every one of these has spent a considerable amount of time with the driving instructor, learning skills of car control, but also higher levels of the GDE and hopefully quite a lot of behavioral road safety as well. So by that, I mean not sort of mirror signal maneuver, but making good decisions, making good choices about, you know, when and how to drive, particularly when they have passengers in the car.

So I think very nicely regulated by DVSA, very well supported within the ADI industry by people like yourselves. Adi NJC Tri coaching. I mean, the list goes on. There's so many people within the sector that provide the professional development that helps instructors be as good as they possibly can at that job. I hope, you know that instructors feel that they can make a real difference to the risk of new drivers that they teach to drive.

So I think they play a huge role in road safety, and I hope that's somewhat obvious. I think the other thing I'd say is that as a conduit to young drivers, they're incredibly powerful because they spend so much time. And I know I've said this on the podcast with you before, when we've spoken about honest truth, the tens of hours one on one with young drivers or learner drivers, and that opportunity to really unpick some of the societal issues around risk perception and transport.

Whether once you qualify, you need to even drive everywhere. If you're in London, actually public transport, or if you're in a city, public transport may provide more economical, safer and more convenient options. And I think know the role of the driving instructor in road safety spans into Sustrans. It spans into so many things just by virtue of that connection they have at this pinch point in everyones journey that everyone remembers throughout the rest of their lives. Really, its huge.

I honestly think thats one of the best answers ive ever had to that question. I love that. Well, no, I think that, you know, its a better answer than I think a lot of Adis could give. I love the fact that you didn't just pinpoint that idea of working with a normal student, if you like. Right at the start, you spoke about, you know, I think young offenders rehabilitated those on that side of it.

And then you mentioned the GD matrix, and it's like so many instructors don't even know what the GD matrix is. And I'm not meaning to criticize anyone when I say this, maybe I am a little bit, but I love the answer. I think that's a really comprehensive answer of what we do within the road safety sector, because a lot of instructors struggle to see that we are involved in it or that we do partake in that. So I love that.

But speaking of the road safety sector, there is a gap between driving instructors that are professional and the road safety sector. I think I describe it as two distant cousins that have fallen out. Why do you think that gap is there? I think it's a really interesting one. And there's parallels as well between not just driving instructors in the perception of the industry, but even within services. You have road safety teams within local authorities.

You then have them within the uniformed services, within police and fire, and even, you know, throughout the last decade or two, there's been, and there has been friction less.

So where you have formal partnerships, but in areas where, you know, road safety partnership isn't formalized and there isn't a structure, you know, there can be friction because there's lots of very passionate, very proactive people depending, you know, depending on budgets and depending on resource, people's abilities to do things in this space are very different.

And when we talk about road safety as a sector, we think that includes engineering, that includes enforcement, that includes education, that includes training. And obviously, driving instructors would sit under that training arm. So they're not there deciding policy, they're not there working out where crash barriers are going to be installed or where low traffic neighborhoods or 20 miles an hour zones are going to sit.

So I suppose the slightly existential challenge for everyone in road safety is, is working out where they fit. And my sort of analogy for this is we're not really cogs in a machine. We're more like eggs in a cake. You can't really ever pin down exactly where we are. We're in there, we're all doing our thing. But it's not as straightforward as just being a cog in a machine.

And how we go about collaborating and playing our part in that ecosystem is a challenge, not just for driving instructors, but I know lots of people across all of those different specialisms. I tend to look at the safe system when I think of this. Now, I often use road piece as an example.

So road piece is obviously providing post crash care, but that doesn't mean they don't actively try and get involved in some of the other aspects, whether it's either through campaigning or advising or whatever. And I think that's as driving trailers. That's what we can do.

We're involved in that safe road users aspect, but we can still campaign, we can still raise money for charities, we can still come to different trainings to support different organizations and utilize things, as you mentioned. The honest truth, do you think that potentially there is more scope for us to do that type of things as instructors? Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, you know, even if you don't do anything sort of extracurricular, driving instructors, you know, in their day to day professional lives, they'll have a huge role to play. But I think as you, as you rightly said earlier, being that conduit, being that channel to a particular road user group does mean that you can go a bit off pieced and start to introduce the campaigning, start to do stuff that's a bit more, you know, ancillary.

So, yeah, I think and just the volume of driving instructors as well, you know, I know we was bound around 40,000, I don't know, obviously there's a lot of people there that aren't actively practicing, but as an industry I think you're like quite formidable really, just based on numbers and access to a very vulnerable road user group.

Yeah, well you mentioned previously about the cake and the ingredients in the cake and the thing I've got you want to talk about today specifically is copilot and I suppose more specifically the Copilot community.

But when you talk about that, my first thought was, I wonder if Copilot's the cake, I wonder if that's what you are. So do you want to take a moment just to tell us about Copilot and I suppose a bit more specifically the Copilot community? Yeah, absolutely. So obviously I've been in road safety for about 20 years and, you know, I think when you've been in something that long, admittedly I started, you know, when I was 1718 with first car, you see a lot of things and you absorb a lot of stuff.

And I think I started to get really excited and re energized again when people were talking about vision zero as a, you know, as a goal and not just kind of the slightly unachievable, you know, even in aviation, a very highly regulated industry and maritime, we don't have a zero and we understand that, but when people sort of talk about 50 by 30, 50% reduction by 2030, these are things that you can hold people to account on.

And I started to think that's really interesting because if insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, the very idea of vision zero means that people are ready to do things differently and it caused me to reflect on what I would or how we could facilitate pushing the sector forward. And I suppose there was two things that really came to my mind. One was a shared toolbox or a library of resources, because, you know, we don't.

There's not a huge amount of evidence to support the idea that local accents, local people. There's a bit. But generally speaking, economies of scale, you know, mean that something in Cumbria can be as effective as something in Cornwall with, you know, non regional accents and all of this sort of stuff.

So a central library of evidence based research driven interventions so that local authorities can just sort of and fire and rescue teams or anyone that's got a conduit can just pick off the shelf and, you know, use, using their, using their local work. That was one thing.

I've made millions of pounds worth of road safety content over the years, and if I look back at it now, how much has been depreciated, how much was ever originally shared, you know, that public money didn't go as far as it could have done, so that's one thing.

And then, as you say, with the community, I think the cake's a good analogy, because traveling around for 20 years, going and looking at all the different safe drive, stay alive performances and having meetings with people, looking at all the different interventions, and I go somewhere else and talk to even just one region next door about it, and they would have no idea what was going on. They wouldn't know the names of the people.

And it just struck me that we needed perhaps a better way to collaborate and network and to kind of share what's going on, like a conference that just kind of lasts like all year, and that's kind of what we're hoping to achieve with the community.

So excited by this. You know, I've said it to you before we started. I've said it to you a few times and I've said it publicly. I just think this is such a wonderful idea and such a wonderful concept and really, really well executed. I mean, just for me, for example, for a moment, when I want to reach out to someone like a road safety professional, an academic, something like that, it can be a bit hard sometimes for me to know who to go to and where to find them.

But like in co pilot, they're all there. People that can just find an access, which I think is great. And I appreciate that. If we bring this back to driving shut, this, most instructors won't have that same desire I do in that kind of area. But I just think what a wonderful resource and ability to network and, you know, to ask you about that networking, I think that even by driving instructors that don't necessarily do what I do, for example, I still think that's underutilized.

And you're nodding your head as I'm saying this, so I'm keen for your thoughts. Do you think that we can do a better job, that you think it's important? Absolutely. I think we can all do a better job of being less siloed. We're all individuals at the end of the day. We've all got our own experiences.

Before we came online today, we were talking about some challenges that we both faced professionally and sharing hopefully some inspirational kind of ideas and sentiment for overcoming that sort of stuff. And I think the same is true of people that work across all the different areas of the safe system.

You know, whether it's campaigning, bereaved families, you know, engineering enforcement, education, anyone who's playing their role or playing a part, you know, has a role in that, you know, would benefit from seeing what everyone else is doing, if for no other reason than just to be motivated and inspired and reassured. The thousands of people working in this sector are all doing so based on evidence, based on research. They're acting tenaciously as a group because we have to.

Too often you hear of budget cuts and low resources and we think this road safety is killing more people than knife crime, than terrorism. It's huge. And rather than just being the lowest common denominator all the time and trying to cut a. Cut everything back, how do we more effectively petition and demand the resources that are needed to get anywhere close to zero?

If ten jumbo jets fell out of the sky every year and another hundred crumbled on the Runway and everyone was left with life changing injuries, no one would fly anywhere. How are we in a state where were not more effective at counterarguments to the things that we know make people safer, lower speed limits, better enforcement? Its just. I don't know.

I mean, I think we need a space to have those conversations, make those connections, reduce waste, improve collaboration, improve sharing, and that's what we hope the community can be. I mean, the two things I've said. Well, say the two things I said recently have annoyed people, but there's been a lot that annoys people. But two things in particular. One is when we talk about five people dying a day, who's teaching them?

You know, we are, as driving instructors for the main part, I know some are parents, whatever, but we are. So we can and should do more. And I believe that as instructors where we can embrace and get involved in something like co pilot, whether that's just to take advantage of the resources there or contribute in some way, I think that we can and should be doing that. But just your example there. About the number of people.

The Grenfell Tower inquest was published recently and I think there was 72 people that died. And full caveat, horrific shouldn't have happened. People should be going to jail as a consequence of what the reporter said. I really believe that. However, that's how many people die every two weeks on UK roads and there's no one up in their arms in the same way about that. I mean, there obviously are such as yourself and me and the road safety sector, but no one in higher power.

So I do think that's fascinating. And I will ask you briefly, I know you kind of answered this on a previous podcast, but I will ask again, why do you think that is? Why do you think that people don't get up in arms about that in the same way they would do about a jumbo jetfront or Grenfell Tower or other instance like that? Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question, and I'm sure there's people with better answers than this.

My gut feel is there's an element of sort of selfishness about the changes that a lot of us would need to make in order to reduce our risk on the road. We'd all need to drive slower. We'd all need to be less distracted. We'd all need to spend a bit more time maintaining our vehicle. And when you get in a plane, you're handing. You're giving lot of power to someone else in your vehicle. You retain that generally moment to moment. So I think you feel more in control.

But I do think there's a lot in the reporting of it and the transparency as well. We've launched something called streaks within copilot, which is an accountability dashboard. It's kind of the visualization of Project Edward and Vision Zero, where you get one big long green sausage that never ends. And then when you look at it like duolingo streaks calendar, we break the chain when there's death.

And I think if people were to look at that, I'm sat in Kent at the moment, that breaks four times a month roughly, in Kent. And I think if people were better able to see, you know, to see the frequency and the severity of these things, I think we always assume, I mean, I'm not on any social media apart from LinkedIn, so I would never know of anything through social media.

I read national press, not really local press, so, you know, things could happen down the road and I might only hear about it from someone else.

I think we always assume that people are connected via press releases, but even when there's a masterclass in the community, actually by Laura Laker, who worked with DfT on some editorial guidelines, trying to get people to stop saying accident, but also importantly, reporting on context, trying to make collisions, rather than just reporting on it as an isolated incident. This is the 32nd car crash in this county this year.

You know, the 10th one that's been caused potentially by someone over the drink drive limit if they don't give that context. And trying to get journalists to be more cognizant of this is a wider thing. Not like it's a bit like hot fuzz. You've seen hot fuzz. Oh, my God. There's been a terrible accident. Oh, my God. Like, can we just wake up and see that this is part. And obviously, you know, Simon Pegg's the only one that gets it. He sees it's part of a worrying trend that's something bigger.

And everyone else is just assuming that it's, you know, a terrible accident, that it's. Yeah. If it wasn't so serious, it would be broadly comical. Anyone that can get a reference into one of the cornet or trilogy on this podcast goes off, in my estimation, playing devil's advocate. Slightly, though, you mentioned some of that stuff being in the copilot community. Is there an element of almost preaching to the converted there?

I think there is going to be an element of that, but in terms of professional development, I mean, when I go in there and I watch, I mean, I filmed all the masterclasses that are in there. So we sit down with someone like Professor Gemma Briggs, you know, Doctor Lisa Dawn, Laura Laker, Sean Hellman for an hour, and we unpick a topic. And in doing that and sitting there filming with these people and editing these things, I've become much better at arguing points in relation to road risk.

So Keenan, who runs my TikTok channel, sent me a WhatsApp a few weeks ago, and he said, look, I've got a guy who's put a comment on this TikTok channel saying, well, I only use my phone once, that I'm stopped in traffic. That can't be bad. And Keenan's thinking, well, maybe it isn't that bad, but I can go straight into that masterclass and I can find the section where Gemma Briggs shows the research that it's not actually the visual distraction of the phone, although that is a problem.

It's the cognitive distraction that lasts for three to six minutes after you've had that interaction. So when the vehicle started moving again in 45 seconds, you're still impaired for another four or five minutes or so, thinking about the content of that message and not on the road scenario, which has changed, you know, since you looked at the message, because I have seen all of this content, I think I'm much more effective at counter arguing points of contention with the public.

So, yes, there is definitely an element of preaching to the converted, but we're not. We're armoring them up. They're already going to go and fight the war. We're just giving them better weapons and better armor, I think I like that. I like that a lot. But what you said there, that comment that that chap made, that almost ties in what you were saying before about the road safety stuff, is we have to make changes individually, individuals.

And I think that's a big thing, because when you speak about knife crime, it's really easy for me not to stab someone. I just won't stab anyone today. Problem solved. But if I want to reduce road harm, I need to change something about what I do. I need to actively not use my phone for anything. I need to decide whether I should have the radio on at a certain time or decide whether I should drive safe. I've got a cold or whatever.

And I kind of touched on what you were saying before, and I just found that interesting. But I do want to bring back to copilot because you mentioned Jeremy Briggs, and I hope this isn't putting you on the spot too much. So, Paul's is in advance for this, but I recorded pajama Briggs for season seven of the instructor podcast. Fascinating person. Could have gone for 3 hours on that easily.

But for someone that's listened to that podcast, which I appreciate, you probably haven't, but if an instructor listens that podcast, would they still benefit from listening to Jeremy Briggs or watching Jeremy Briggs within copilot on that training? Is that going to be, you know, probably different to what I've done? I mean, I think, you know, it's the same reason that, you know, when you see a Volvo advert on tv, you say you see the same thing, or broadly the same thing, like a dozen times.

And that's, you know, that's just how we are. You hear things multiple times in slightly different ways, and you pick up different things. Obviously, a podcast is much more free flowing conversation. People would get things from that interaction, things that they. That they wouldn't get from the very structured, self serve masterclass, where she's unpicking, you know, very specific things in a short two or three minute video.

I think the thing we try and do in all our masterclasses, which is easier to do when you're going through, like, an e learning style thing, is, is have. Under the video, there's a big vertical of content. So we bring in a lot of contextual stuff. So it's not just hearing it from Gemma. Briggs will then link into related YouTube videos from other authors or further reading to kind of give people a 360 kind of experience around that narrative. So it is slightly different people.

You know, even though these master classes are about an hour of video, they're probably three or 4 hours worth of reading around the topic and going into depth. But I think on a podcast you'd be able to explore far more interesting angles that we wouldnt necessarily get from that. So I think if you can do it, if you can do multiple forms of CPD, then thats really good.

Do you think within copilot is going to be the most use or what do you think instructors will get the most from within core pilot community? Its a really interesting one because obviously the community is in its infancy now and think what we need to do is be really aware of how our membership's building, what things people are interested in, and actually build architecture to let that stuff thrive.

So if we get, you know, 100, 200 driving instructors come in and they are part of the community, obviously they're going to get value out of the master classes, out of the research library, they're going to get value out of some of the, you know, the briefings and the events diaries and things like that.

But actually, you know, at that volume we probably need to, we would come back to someone like you, Terry and others in the industry and say, look, how do we add more value for the driving instructor demographic within this community? And we would start to build potentially architecture that gives them more bespoke content. But obviously if we don't get a large volume of driving instructors, we get a load of engineers. We'll be having a conversation about doing that for engineering type stuff.

So I don't know is the honest answer. The briefings are really good. What I like about the briefings is that we've put them together from a journalistic, independent point of view. So we'll take a press release and then we'll look at it and say, is this right? It's fine that you say this on a press release, but is what you're saying correct? And we will reference other sources, will be objective and a little bit like driving instructors are short on time.

We want to make sure that when you come into the briefing section, it's like you've got an assistant sat there like on yes, minister giving you a briefing. Right. This is what it is, this is what the context is, these are the risks, this is the reward. You've got a well rounded journalistic understanding of an issue rather than just what pressure releases has said. Yeah, research library masterclass is the show and tell.

I think it'd be great for people to show what driving instructors are actually doing and contributing towards the industry. I think that would raise a lot of awareness within policymakers, local authorities, emergency services, of the role of driving instructors just by demonstrating what's already going on. Really hard to say. I'm quite excited to find out. Well, let me just ask you quickly about that show and tell, then, because that sounds interesting, but what is it?

Well, the show and tell is a section, literally, where you go in there and say, this is what I'm doing. So, for example, Warwickshire have built a memorial Roe victim Memorial park with a really nice kind of gold sculpture type thing. And what they've said is, we will make the artwork for this sculpture available free of charge to anyone that wants to replicate this in their area.

And hopefully, eventually we could have a nationwide network of road victim memorial areas that anyone, whether they're on holiday, they can go and pay. Remember people? And I think that was a really nice thing that I know they've got one, but I didn't really know that the artwork was free. I didn't know there was an ambition to create a network of. Of sites for remembrance. And that was them showing and telling that Sussex safer roads went to the festival of speed.

And they were talking about, how do you go to an audience of people that are obsessed with speed and talk about road safety and the kind of interactions that they had with people there. They were showing and telling, and we were learning. So having a platform to show and tell all the cool stuff that you've been up to is like a dream, because we're all slightly built like that. We want to do something cool. We want to tell people about it. And that's quite right.

I like that you sold me on that alone now, because I can go and show my stuff. Terry, you could fill the whole thing. Just somewhere I can say things where people are going to criticize me. That would be quite nice. I can't guarantee that. Now. You ruined it. But no, you mentioned before about value, and you've already made it better value for driving fitness by bringing in a 40% discount that's available to instructors. So I'm keen to ask why. Why did you want to offer adis?

And I suppose potentially pdis, but that. Discount, I think the first thing is that basically, pretty much everyone that joins from a local authority, a fire and rescue service corporation, they'll be VAT registered, so they can claim their VAT portion back. So immediately it becomes 20% more expensive for driving instructors versus someone else I think the other thing just to recognize is driving instructors are small business people.

They've got a lot of other expenses, their independence, it's their own business. A lot of people that will come through the community will be from a public sector background or they'll be from a corporation background. I know money's money at the end of the day and I don't want to get into overly discounting something that I think is good value, but for a road safety practitioner, it's the cost of going to a conference with all the on costs and there's 20 hours of CPD in there.

There's nearly 200 research papers all summarized in a research library. I'm just aware of the fact that driving instructors, whilst they'll be interested in that, how much this can directly contribute towards, you know, their job is, is potentially less. But I don't, I don't want them to be sidelined. And we'll probably do the same thing for campaigners, for people, you know, doing great work, bereave families.

You know, ultimately we need to get away from this idea that we can do everything for free and it's all going to be good quality and it's going to be sustainable, because that isn't reality. And that's always been my view. If theres value exchanged, people should pay for things and then theyve got the right to expect it to be good quality and for it to be long lasting.

But I wouldnt want to charge an individual whos lost someone in a road crash and doing great work, campaigning to lose 20% on the VAT immediately and they cant claim it back against budget codes and things. So thats basically what it is. Terry, wed love to do this all a lot cheaper. And my big vision is that this community grows and in a few years time, someone like DfT, someone like national highways or some sort of government department comes along and says, do you know what?

I will just pay for everyone nationally to have access to this. This is the last bargain left on earth for the industry. But the way to show the big budget holders that this is something that people want is for people to pay for it themselves, independently first. I like that. Well, I like a lot you said today, but you kind of spoke about going forward there a little bit. Is there anything else you want to touch on around copilot? Anything that's coming up? Any future plans?

Well, there's lots going on with the toolbox, lots of cool content coming out and I hope certainly in areas where we've got copilot members I'm certainly encouraging them to reach out and use adis more as a channel, as a route to market copilot, the community.

All I would say is get involved and shape it. You've got to be in it. And hopefully, Terry, when you join, you'll inspire a lot discussion and conversation. I think you'll, you know, I'll certainly be taking your advice on how we build, you know, this best to serve, you know, driving instructors that come on board. Really excited for copilot.

You know, it's a huge, you know, you hit 40, start a new business, invest all the money you've ever made over the last 20 years in hoping that it will be a success. But, you know, nothing good was ever a sure thing. We've just, you know, just hoping this takes off in the way that we, you know, we hope it will. I recognize that feeling. And I have two days free in October where I'll be signing up and spending two days going through. But, yeah, I've thoroughly enjoyed this chat.

I always enjoy speaking to you, and it's fascinating picking your brains around this stuff. But do you want to just take a moment to tell people where they can find you, what you have to offer, anything like that? Yeah, absolutely. So we're copilot.org and you'll be able to have a look at the toolbox, have a look at the community on there. You can sign up instantly and you can be in the community creating your own profile, uploading your avatar.

I'm on LinkedIn with James Evans and yeah, you can always reach out to me, Jameso pilot.org, and we can chat via email. I'm sure, Terry, you'll signpost anyone that kind of comes through. But just want to say thank you very much for having me on.

I'm a huge fan of yours and all this great work that you're doing. I think very similar to bring stuff like what you've done to life in the copilot community. It takes a lot of commitment and, you know, and work. And I think how you're serving this industry is, you know, is incredible. So thank you very much for everything that you're doing. I'm going to move swiftly on from the compliment because I don't take them well, but I do.

Just one last point, actually, because corpilot.org and there will be links in the show notes. But I want to emphasize that because last question I'm going to ask you, how annoyed are you that Microsoft have their AI labeled copilot? So when you go online and search for Copilot. Microsoft's AI is the first thing that pops up. Yeah, it's a bit of a double edged sword, really. I mean, Copilot was always the brand that I wanted because we've never wanted to be the thing.

We just want to be like the little intel inside sticker in the corner you eventually peel off. We're not looking for the glory out of this. We just want to be like powered by Copilot. We're like, we're the helper. We're not the pilot, we're the copilot. And I'm married to a lawyer. It's a pain in the ass most of the time, but actually it's quite useful when it came to registering trademarks. So we got in there and got copilot registered.

Then obviously Microsoft have come in with the unhyphenated version. So I don't know, I don't feel like this is something that's going to be googled a lot. I don't think it's an impulse purchase that someone's just going to go find online. I think we're okay. But, yeah, it's good. I think it means we've chosen a good brand if Microsoft have endorsed it. But yes, it does present a slight SEO conflict. Great. Well, on that note, I'll just take a moment to thank you for your time again today.

It's been a pleasure, as always. Great. Thank you, Terry. So, as always, on the driving instructions Vision Zero podcast, I'm joined by the delightful Ollie Taylor. And for carrying background knowledge, we are currently at the intelligent instructor and Adi NgSE lot of words explore. How we doing, Ollie? Oh, really good, Terry. How you doing yourself? All the way. I've seen your say all the right. Things at all right times. And I had a Ollie hook today as well. You did? Absolutely.

Yeah. Always get an Ollie hug from me. We are at the expo. How do you find these? Because I know you've been to a few of these. How do you find them? And you know something, Terry, these are really, really good for a whole number of reasons. One, it promotes the honest truth and it promotes the work that I'm trying to do with driving instructors to support and help drive the driving instructor community around road safety. But also, it's a great way to connect with old friends and make new ones.

I've had so many of our THD instructors come up to me today and say, oh, Ollie, great to see you here. You know, fantastic. Giving feedback, you know, giving me feedback on what we're doing. But also making all those new connections as well. So meeting new people who maybe have heard of us but weren't quite sure what we were about. So I've come along to find out more and have gone. That's exactly what I need. So, all in all, a really good day for me. Really good day.

And I was speaking to Richard Stars, and he says they've done record number steer, which is good, but there's still an awful lot of driving. Truckers aren't here. Would you advise instructors to come along to events like this? Oh, 100%. 100%. You know, 45,000 driving instructors around the United Kingdom, a thousand or so attend here. Really small percentage of the driving instructors out there that come to these events.

This is the Adi. NJC intelligent Instructor Expo is the showcase for ADIs across the country again. It'll be gone again next year. Absolutely. You know, I appreciate it's a lot of. Lots of travel for some people. Be driving 5 hours to get me to get home later on today. Actually, if I can make it 5 hours up, 5 hours back, anybody else can make it. It's absolutely worth visiting. 100%. But we are coming to end of September, and this is the month when we release all the casualty figures of road.

Casualty figures? Yeah, it's never a nice time. They were a nice thing to read. But from the stats, is there anything that stands out to you? Yeah. Yes, Terry, there are two things that stood out for me from this year's statistics. One was the overall reduction, small reduction in overall fatalities on the roads. 5%. Great. Any reduction has got to be applauded. However, that isn't a time to sit on our laurels.

It's a time to build on that work that started to reduce those stats even further down. So that's a really good news, but not so positive news from, you know, from reading through it was an increase in pedestrian fatalities. You know, that's just disappointing. It's worrying. But actually, it does mean that road safety strategies know where to put some resource and effort into those pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries. Why is that? I haven't got an answer for that, unfortunately.

Terry, other than we've got the hierarchy of road users in the highway code, the new rule, rule h one, where those that can cause the most harm on the road bear the greatest responsibility, reduce the risk to others. I think that's the wording. Without having my highway code in front. Of you, I couldn't tell. You did better than me. That's pretty much the wording. So it's really important excuse the noise in the background. Really important that everybody on the road understands where they sit.

In the hierarchy of road users, really important, those that can cause the greatest harm bear the greatest responsibility that I know is in the highway code, but also vulnerable road users, which pedestrians form part of the group of road users, also their responsibility to do what they can to improve their safety on the roads as well. It's a shared space. It's a shared responsibility. Yes, of course.

Under the hierarchy of road users, those in cars and other vehicles have to reduce the risk they pose to others in any way they can. Giving bundle road users four easy words. Time, space, wide, slow. Give them time, give them space. Awesome. Wide, passing, slide. But also the thunderbolt. Road users to be aware of what's around them, don't assume. Be really aware of your surroundings and also do what you can to keep yourself safe when you're out and about.

Yeah, and I think this is almost a good excuse for driving instructors to talk more about this. No, when this has been highlighted that there is that increase, I think it's the first time in about ten years where there's that increase in pedestrian fatalities. It's a perfect excuse for interrupting talk about with their learners. Would you agree? Oh, 100%, absolutely.

When you've got stats like that available, why not use them to your advantage as a driving instructor to talk to your students about it? Say, did you know, if you see venerable road users, particularly pedestrians, give them a second thought. Think about how you're going to manage that situation. How am I going to manage this pedestrian if they're not on a footway or a pathway? Particularly in rural areas, they're crossing roads. If they're crossing at junctions, forget the new rules.

If you've got a pedestrian crossing a junction that you're turning into, that pedestrian has priority. You need to wait until they've crossed, not pass in front of them. Wait till they've crossed, make sure they're safe, then you. Then you can progress your journey. That's the hierarchy of road users. That's what the highway code tells us. One last thing I want to speak to you about today, and this was specifically around the honest truth, which I'm sure you're familiar with.

I've heard of it, yeah. I know you've had a bit of an update around your registration process about that. Absolutely, yes. And so we've been doing a lot of work in the back end of the app. This is going to benefit me considerably more than it's going to benefit instructors out there. What it means, Terry, is that as of late last night, the new registration process is fully automated. So any instructor that wants to join up now can go onto the website, click the join now button.

You could be then delivering truths to your pupils within about 2025 minutes. The whole it's seamless, it's a game changer for me. I'm going to get some of my life back.

So not that I resent it, not that I resent the work I do for 1 second, but it does mean I can actually focus my time and energy into developing new partnerships, trying to engage with new rotating partnerships so we can look to try and get some more funding in more areas so more ADR's, more instructors can benefit from the honest truth. And unfortunately for you, it means I now know you've got more time. So it means I'm going to press the. I never see it as pestering me.

I think you're an absolute star and it's always an absolute pleasure to talk to you. That feels like a nice way to end it.

But do you know what? It's been lovely recording this room in person today. Probably back to zoom for next month's great recording in person. So thank you for your time, as always, Terry. You are so, so welcome and have a safe journey home.